> Sennett further notes the inadequacies of written language to “depict physical action” (179). Laboratories and workshops become the exemplar, places where “the spoken word seems more effective than written instructions” (179). Sennett also illustrates this point by examining the how-to instructions of various chefs. Ultimately, the instructions that show, rather than tell, provide the best experience and results for the novice cooks. In these cases, however, showing was not done by physical presence per se, but through narratives and metaphors which “give each physical action [of the recipe] heavy symbolic weight” (193).

With this dissertation I attempt to understand the factors made and that make software plainly utilitarian. The economic dimensions always seem omnipresent as an uphill battle, but I'm too exited about the potentials of computers and software to give up on the fight for “cultural software” (Lev Manovich, 2011). Moreover I'm motivated by movements that question the political and social elements that are translated into the technical domain. "The computer world deals with imaginary, arbitrary made up stuff that was all made up by somebody. Everything you see was designed and put there by someone. [...] There are so many ideas to care about, and with ideas comes the politics of ideas." (Nelson, 2012)

> Ultimately, I find The Craftsman to be a compelling argument for the dynamic matrix-like development of knowledge, character, and community. All three of these, Sennett argues and I agree, are severely damaged when work is not understood as craft.

I hope to have addressed indirectly the situation of computer illiteracy and made a stance for what we users should be demanding. I am simply weary of interface constructs that seem to make the learning of the behind the scenes elements harder because they have no reason, and therefor make me think that there may be a hidden agenda in these practices. This suspicion is probably more often false than true, but is a growing concern stemming from “the Agile Turn”(Gürses and van Hoboken, 2016). Confirming this statement is not an area I want to research, for fear of what I might find, but the example of ways in which lack of functional computer knowledge is leveraged for a solutionist financial gain occur very often online and across digital services. They offer something for free, but get a lot more out of the data that is harvested from their user base. These are reasons why I advocate for wider spread knowledge of the functioning of information systems. Meanwhile, in and for all of this the *learning* aspects are key, and it is with the ideas of learning and spreading knowledge that I stay motivated.

To state this opinion clearly: I am not holding the position that every human must learn computer architectures and programming languages. What I am calling for are interfacing methods that do not aim for seamlessness, that reveal their parts, toggling between heterogeneous and homogeneous displays, and that trust their users as equally smart as the software builders. I do not believe that everybody must be on similar technical levels of understanding computer technologies either, but I do think that a broader and better understanding of all of the types and all of the layers of abstractions that are needed for computers and networks to function is, in my opinion, a valiant way forwards.